By Legal Futures Associate Legmark
The largest legal sector digital marketing database of its kind is held online at reports.legmark.com and is updated each month with millions of bits of website data from over 5,700 law firm websites already on the system.
As part of continued innovation and development in digital marketing for the legal sector, Legmark have further developed their ‘digital dashboard’ to now include audits of law firm websites to aid performance improvements.
Common issues found across law firm websites include poor mobile performance, broken internal links, duplicate content, and missing or incorrect metadata – technical factors that substantially influence your visibility.
Law firms are able to access details of all optimisation issues on their websites as well as their competitors via the new ‘profiles’ feature in the Digital Dashboard
Law firms are able to access both their website’s audit score and associated issues, as well as view any of the other 5,700 law firm websites – so they can benchmark against their competition.
Some firms are using the software as a way to monitor the performance of their digital marketing agency and direct activity more effectively.
The dashboard provides overall industry averages based on analysis of all the websites on the database and acts as a good benchmark for the health of law firm websites in general. Currently the industry average page speed score is a lowly 64/100. Given that page speed correlates with conversion rate, there’s a clear sign law firms are leaving money ‘on the table’ by failing to convert more of their website traffic.
Many law firms don’t even have a ‘secure’ website with a valid SSL certificate, as they use a http rather than https version of the site.
At a time when many firms are struggling to increase online revenue or fully exploit the potential of digital marketing as a long-term revenue stream, the digital dashboard is a free resource to support in-house marketing or sense-check what agencies are doing to help firms generate an ROI on their digital marketing budget.
The audit score is based on a proprietary calculation weighting the more important issues and their prevalence on the website to provide a single metric as a KPI for agencies or in-house teams.
Sam Borrett, Director of Legmark, said: “I’ve lost count of the number of firms I’ve worked with over the last 15 or so years, all with such similar issues with their websites, and also having been given bad advice about best practices.
“Whether it’s new websites launched that are slow and full of technical SEO problems, or far too much blog content being published on law firm websites that has no benefit to the site at all – in fact is harming the overall website performance.
“The idea behind the dashboard is that any size firm can easily access independent data on their site, and their competitors, in a cost-effective way to improve their online performance and ultimately to make more money from their website.”
In addition to the technical audits, the new ‘Law Firm Profiles’ feature includes a review score based on recent reviews, and a sentiment analysis for the firm based on the content of those reviews.
The next steps are to make this information available to the public so they can make more informed decisions about which law firm they want to use.
Law firms can also access data on which websites perform best on specific areas of law, and what keywords to target for those services, as well as track their own Google rankings for certain search terms.
Any firm signed up for a paid account, can also access a monthly optimisation plan giving them instructions on what specific issues to address on their website to improve performance.
To check your audit scores, and review all the data on your website and your competitors, access the digital dashboard for free at reports.legmark.com
